No More a Songbird
by LunaSphere
Summary: Stormwing fic. Summary courtesy of Gavin Gunhold: "There is pretty terrible serial killing, but then those serial killers are in love and basically it's awful but you can't look away."
1. Chapter 1

A/N: I've always wondered why there are so few Immortal POV fics--there are only two I know of ("Of Magic and Bathtubs" by **Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod** and "The Beauty with the Beast" by **Merrybeans**). Both are excellent, but I thought I'd try to expand the genre a little.

Edit: Discovered two more awesome Stormwing-centric fics: "I could be the feather in your cap" and "Preen" by **Gavin Gunhold**.

Various conversations in the Ficship forums (www. fanfiction .net/forum/The_Ficship_Competitions/54838/) really brought this fic into being. It is a fun place--go check it out.

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Barzha looked over her flock as they contentedly glutted themselves on the living terror of the few survivors and bodies of the dead. One of the youngsters was trying to clumsily pry off a limb from a carcass as others watched and laughed.

The Stormwing queen smiled at his antics indulgently as she sat back and tried to pick the gristle out from between her teeth with her tongue, but it was lodged just near the gum and there was no helping it she knew. Well, it was a small irritation to have to bear after such a filling meal. With each bite, she had tasted the dead man's life, eaten his memory, drank in his dreams. The tangy metallic taste of the liver lingered on her tongue even as she relieved herself over the corpse now that she'd eaten her fill.

The fear-filled empty gaze of the befouled corpse stared into the sun.

That night, she knew, she would dream the dead man's days, live his joys and sorrows. Having devoured his flesh, she would live a mortal, a human for a night in her dreams. Flesh-eating was an acquired taste really—it took the fledglings a couple of centuries before they understood the attraction of it.

The fear her kind needed to abate their hunger, but the memories devoured through the flesh, those were for a pleasure she could not put words to. From what Hebakh told her, it was something akin to the pleasure humans took in poetry.

Barzha felt the air move and looked up to find Jokhun winging down beside her, his talons tearing a dead human child's limbs as he settled. "Satisfied with this pitiful skirmish, my queen Razorwing?"

Barzha's eyes, as dark as the iron crown on her head, flared with anger. "Are you asking for a duel, Jokhun Foulreek?"

"No, no, of course not." Jokhun batted his wings in denial. "It is the younger ones, you know, stirring up trouble. Saying that you and your consort are too weak to make humans fear us as they should."

Barzha narrowed her eyes in disgust at his blatant posturing. At last she spit, her yellowish saliva landing near his talon, to let Jokhun know just what she thought of his tactics. There was not much else she could do about the conniving idiot unless he challenged her directly. But he was too much a worm to do so and knew she had too much honor to attack him without provocation. But perhaps she worried for naught. Surely, the rest of the flock would never be foolish enough to fall for his ridiculous plots. Her contentment in the meal was soured in any case.

She spread her wings to take off. The rest joined her belatedly.

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As Barzha drank in the fear of the Banjiku slaves prostrated before her cage, she refused to let herself dwell on how far she had fallen. When the slaves raised up their heads at last, clearing away the sickly sweet incense and flowers they had brought as offerings, she deliberately released her bowels, letting fall a chain of feces. The humans recoiled back in revulsion and the tinge of disgust that colored their terror now added a sweeter flavor to it.

She heard Hebakh bating on a perch behind her, and the vision of his razorsharp wings spreading out, the feathers shrieking against each other, made their fear spike further.

This sweet wine, she had missed for so long. Four centuries' worth of hunger. The humans scurried away like insects, leaving the pleasant, spicy fragrance of their panic behind them.

A queen of the Stone Tree nation reduced to this. But Stormwings had always lived off the leavings of humans. No, it was the indignity of the cage, the betrayal of her own clan that drove her to the edge of madness.

When she got her talons on that motherless worm Johkun, she would tear out each feather from his wings before she killed him and as for that Emperor Mage, she would savor the little maggot's liver and shred his heart even as it beat. He would die slowly and painfully and she would sear the memory of his death into human minds. The little mortal dungbeetle thought he could cage her, put her on display like some animal in his collection? She would make him feel the wrath of Stormwing.

"Ease, dear heart."

She turned to find Hebakh's pale, intense eyes on her. He was a two centuries or so younger than her, but the strongest _vates_ the Stone Tree had ever known. She had been their queen, but he, he had been their _vates_. That the wretched cockroaches who dared to masquerade as Stormwings would turn on _him_!

Had they forgotten all Stormwing lore in the headiness of returning to the mortal realms? It was the _vates_ who carried the souls of the tribe, who bore the memories of their ancestors. To think that _her_ tribe had betrayed their own heritage like a nest of serpents devouring their dam!

"Shall I share a memory with you, love?" He settled on the perch beside her and Barzha saw the red-gold glow of magic shimmering on his wings, he fluttered them and the threads of magic drifted upward weaving into a delicate fabric above her which fell like a veil over her eyes as his light-filled eyes glowed with memories not his own. "From the First Ancestor."

And Barzha felt her consciousness slip away and into another's much as it did in flesh-eating dreams...

_At first she thought she had lost her way, for she was sure the village she had stopped at on her way up north during the spring thaws should be around here some where. But then she had found the village and wished she had lost her way after all. _

_The thatch had burned away on nearly all the buildings, and only a wall here and there remained to suggest the shape of human habitation. That and the charred, rotting bodies. It must have been months ago, from the look of the corpses, the skin dried like leather, the eyes picked out by birds and the bodies housing worms. _

_But the forest was working to reclaim everything, folding the poor battered village into its embrace, and soon all the pain, the death, and the memory of those who had lived here would be erased in its green embrace. Saplings were sprouting through lintels and vines creeping over the dead, as if to cradle their ravaged bodies. _

_Standing by a hollowed out house, she wondered if it had belonged to the farmer who had given her a night's lodging for his share of song. She fingered the arrow shafts buried in the singed wooden frame and refused to look in the eyesockets of the corpse that grinned at her from within. Maggots writhed just under the skin, creating the grotesque parody of a beating heart and breathing chest._

_They had built a large bonfire in the heart of the village and all had clustered around as she had sung all the popular songs from the port cities for half the night, sea shanties and battle songs and court madrigals she remembered. She'd asked them for the local ones so she could add to her collection. A youth had produced a ballad she had never heard before and an old woman a lullaby that sounded as ancient as the earth._

_The youths had all listened with eager eyes as she sung the war sagas, the glory of battle, the beauty of the sword. A few had bragged of their plans to join the militias in the city and she wondered now if she herself had helped sow the seeds of village's destruction. Every town she had walked through that autumn, it seemed, was ravaged and half-decimated by war, the crops rotting in the fields because there was no one left to harvest them._

_She had tried to give a decent burial to the bodies, but there had been too many. She had only dug half a dozen graves by the time the sun set. In end, she had given up, making camp for the night at the edge of the village, trying to forget the corpses. _

_But she had dreamed of them that night, the broken, decayed bodies getting up to perform a grotesque dance as they listen to her play her harp and sing of the glory of war. She woke up gasping in fear and terror. She wished, then, that her nightmare would take shape and show others the true face of war._

_That night a flock of metal-winged creatures descended on the ruined village. She was the first human they killed, her memory immortalized through her flesh as they devoured it._

Barzha felt herself released into her own mind as the _vates _working came to an end. Hebakh still sat back, grey eyes half-lidded as he concentrated on the magic. When the red-gold veil at last shimmered into nothing, she asked "Why show me this now?"

He smiled at her, a cold, cruel smile that showed his pointed, blood-encrusted teeth. "The Emperor Mage's time will come, my queen, my heart. Humans never know what they ask for."


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: I disclaim ownership of everything but the order of the words.

_This Stormwing lovestory is for Gavin Gunhold who made me realize it was even a possibility. Set a century after the Immortals are sealed in the Divine Realms._

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Barzha thinks of him as nothing more than another fledgling until _vates_ Karash seeks her out one long night in the Realms. She has been watching the stars turn in their slow, eternal dance, and wondering if her tribe too would share their cold, immovable fate.

It is a slow death in a way, as if true to their name, her tribe is turning to stone. There has not been a Stormwing nestling in nearly a century among the Stone Tree. From what she can glean from other rulers, all of them too jealous of their power to admit weakness plainly, hers is not the only flock suffering in such a way. She muses as she watches the stars burn their cold fire if she is one of a dying breed. Perhaps it is a matter of being deprived of sustenance for so long. True they are immortal and can not die, can not _starve_ to death even without human fear to prey upon, but without that nourishment, without that purpose perhaps they have lost the will to live.

Barzha snorts inelegantly even as the thoughts cross her mind. Stormwings are made of sterner stuff than that. Sinew strung on steel. Her talons dig into the tree branch she is perched on. She will see to it that the Stone Tree nation survives even if she has to feed them from her own stinking carcass.

It is such thoughts Karash interrupts when he comes to beg his queen for release.

"Would you leave our service then, Moonsword?"

But her _vates_ does not respond, and instead merely lowers his weary green gaze from her eyes to her talons.

"So," she responds at last. "You come with your decision already made," and Karash for all his age and fierceness flinches at the sharp blade of anger in her voice.

But it is the very fact that the old Stormwing flinches that makes Barzha realize he has outlived his burden for as long as he can. He is no longer the imperturbable, steel-willed _vates_ she remembers from her youth. Acceptance of this fact tastes as acrid as defeat on the battlefield in her mouth, but she is regal to the last feather on her body and shows nothing beyond haughty displeasure. "Have you chosen your successor?"

"Hebakh Starsteel, majesty." The green eyes dare to look at her again and Barzha is struck by how like wavery, scratched glass they have become. But she is not one to be moved by pity, even for old and trustworthy subjects.

"That youngling?" she spits derisively.

"He is the only one, majesty. And strong beyond his years." The green gaze turns inward and regains some of its old sharpness. "The strongest by far the Stone Tree has ever known." Karash says this with a finality of a _vates_ and Barzha can do nothing but bow her head in acquiescence at the truth in his words.

"And wise enough to serve as Queen's Counsel?"

"I fear, Queen, that I cannot hold onto the souls much longer. They will surely devour me and be lost to the ether. Release me."

But he has not answered her pointed question and she realizes it is because regardless of the answer, there is only one path open to her, open to the Stone Tree.

Barzha considers a moment longer. _Immortals_ humans, short-lived and irritating as gnats, called her kind because they cannot understand. There is death; honorable on the battlefield and in the dueling circle and in the dueling circle, shameful at the hands of humans. And there is the slow ebb of desire that only the oldest Stormwings, those who had lived so many millennia that time loses meaning, face. For a _vates_, this comes much sooner. Weighed down by innumerable souls and memories, they seem to be devoured from within.

Her flock will be one less. The familiar strength and wisdom she has known even before she won her queenship in combat centuries ago and has relied on so heavily ever since then will be gone. But she has not been queen for so long without understanding she must bend to the inevitability of fate rather than break against it.

"Then we release you. The Stone Tree Nation releases you." She intones the ceremonial words, "May your memory be eaten." For that was the fate of the _vates_, the twice-cursed. Vessels for the souls of the tribe's ancestors, caught in webs of memories threading back through time, and yet themselves never to be remembered beyond the memory of the living.

"We will not see you again." And this is both a command and a statement of fact.

_Starsteel_, Barzha muses after Karash Moonsword has winged off from her presence for the last time. She wonders if there is a reason that the more poetically named clans tend to produce _vates_. With a grim smile, she concludes that if that is the case, Hebakh Starsteel must have been born for the calling.

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As Barzha expects, Hebakh comes to offer his fealty late one night soon after her final meeting with Karash. There have been murmurs of dissent ever since it has become known that_ vates_ Karash Moonsword asked for release and named an inexperienced fledgling as his successor that Barzha has quieted ruthlessly with steel talon and wing. But what she is more worried about are the fissures in the Stone Tree that run deeper than this.

It is in this preoccupied mood that some Stormwing is foolish enough to interrupt her by landing on a branch close behind her perch. In true Stormwing fashion, Barzha does not respond well to surprise and attacks reflexively. Before she is even aware of who the intruder is, a feather in her wing has sliced against his cheekbone.

And then she sees his face. His luminous grey eyes are filled with a touch of madness, and Barzha knows that Karash lives now only in the memory of those who knew him.

"Forgive me, _vates_." She tilts her head slightly but does not concede anything further.

"Yes." He responds, acknowledging both the apology and the title as the blood trickles down his cheek.

Barzha has never before had the opportunity to scrutinize a _vates_ after he has devoured the mind of his predecessor. _The Eaters_, humans called her kind and the title is more fitting than they will ever know. She is struck at once by how young he is and how old he looks. There are crow lines beside his eyes for all that he is centuries younger than she.

She asks after him, and closing his too bright eyes briefly he responds, "They tasted of honey and bitterness. Sweetness and wormwood. I did not know souls would taste of such."

There is a strange detachment in his voice, as if he speaks in a dream, "As if molten steel courses through my veins, and my body will be nothing more than a burnt husk."

And she thinks, _Stormwing eyes were never meant to hold so much light_. She moves to perch beside him.

Barzha watches him with a fathomless expression: his body shudders and she is struck by how frail a vessel can bear so much. Others would hardly call a Stormwing body with its metallic talons and wings of a bird of prey and the sharp, pointed teeth of a predator a frail form. But as she watches Hebakh's shoulders tremble, setting his feathers clinking softly against each other she feels as if she at last has glimpsed mortality, has seen an existence as fine as spidersilk, more truly than she has ever seen it in any flesh-eating dream.

She brings her face close to his and licks at the blood that is still flowing sluggishly from his cheek. And as her tongue lingers over the wound that she has inflicted, cleaning it even as she revels in the taste of his blood, he at last opens his eyes. They are still luminous although the razor edge of madness has receded somewhat.

She whispers against his skin. "You bear the souls of our dead on your wings and I the living. Together, we will manage, somehow."


End file.
